When he talks about the “non-partisan” support of librarians for authors, he means that librarians aren’t there to make sales as retailers and publishers are. Of course, in some ebook pilot projects and partnerships between libraries and publishers, sales are possible and not disliked, last I heard.

But he’s right that the classic stance of the librarian is not quite hand-selling as much as it is hand-guidance for readers. And he does a careful turn on the tightrope of public commentary to say what he means:

When you think of the people who are advocating for authors right now, we have one enormous Internet bookseller that really wants to sell books. Don’t get me wrong, I think that if Amazon has any priority in this whole wide world, it’s to sell the hell out of books. But it’s to sell the hell out of books to benefit Amazon, not because they’re evil but because they’re a for-profit institution and that’s their thing.

And:

Publishers want to sell the hell out of books, too, and they want to sell the hell out of your books provided your books are profitable for them. But as we all know, publishers aren’t charities, and when writers cease being profitable enough for them, we end up getting dropped.

So devoted to what he’s saying that he barely has take a breath yet, Doctorow brings it down to this:

There’s only one powerful voting bloc out there whose only interest is in promoting authorship, books, and knowledge, to the exclusion of things like shareholders, or Kindle ebook sales or lock-ins, or ad sales, or the invasion of privacy, and that’s libraries.

“B&N & S&S…have resolved their outstanding business issues. Both parties said they look forward to promoting great books by S&S authors.”

What the Authors for Library eBooks program wants writers to do is talk it up. The site’s text asks authors to do the following:

Talk to your publisher. Let them know libraries to not compete with the book market; they stimulate it…Talk to your fellow authors. Ask them whats going on with their ebooks at libraries…Blog, tweet (using hashtag #A4LE), email and publicly share your support for library e-lending.

The site also provides a badge authors can use to show their support of the project on their Websites and contact information One thing Doctorow mentions in his comments is libraries “under such vicious assault in this time of austerity and contracting access to public services.

More than 20,000 people have signed a petition against library closures in Lincolnshire, with local politicians attacking the county council’s plans to shut or pass to volunteers 32 of 47 libraries and mobile libraries. Lincolnshire County Council is hoping to save £2m from its overall budget. But protests against the cuts have been building, with a march on the County Hall planned for 13th September, and a further march planned in Lincoln city centre on 21st March.

Doctorow knows what to do with such crises:

So many of us discovered our love of books in libraries, and so many of our readers did, that we need to preserve them. [If the number of booksellers continues to decline], who’s left but the librarian?—who takes that one-book-a-day kid who’s going to be the 20 percent who reads 80 percent of the books, and when they walk in says, “Here’s a book you’ve got to read.”

Dennis Abrams

Now listen up. Hear that? Coming toward us. Yes, it’s the sound of entrepreneurial authors groaning. They, who already are somehow publicizing, marketing, designing, formatting, editing, and (oh, yeah) writing the books, now need to “come on out” and stick up for the libraries, too, huh? Did you want fries with that? There also are gray areas still very much in shakedown involving how self-publishing authors fare when they approach libraries with their books (some report being welcomed, others not so much). If you need some background here, see my Publishing Perspectives colleague Dennis Abrams’ writeup As Ebooks Strain Libraries, Can Self-Publishers Make Inroads?

Basing his piece on recent reports from NPR’s Morning Edition on libraries, he looks at what’s being called the “Douglas County (Colorado) Model,” which removes the traditional distributor and leverages books from Mark Coker’sSmashwords, independent publishers, and self-publishers to bring in content outside the reach of the major publishing houses.

“With a digital platform in place, libraries can do more than just distribute ebooks. They can publish them as well.” – Dennis Abrams on Jamie LeRue of Douglas County Libraries

At the same time, it’s important to remember that there may be — just guessing, I cite no research here — skeptics among authors who mistrust, as some publishers do, the idea that library patrons are book buyers and that the exposure of books in library circulation raises their sales potential. In short, the lines of allegiance and potential here are, like so many things in publishing, fuzzy. Already overworked authors feeling the pressure of widening entrepreneurial duties may wonder if they have time to take onboard the library question, too. But Doctorow is a working author, himself, whose schedule of appearances can look like something off a flight attendant’s calendar. Clearly, he sees reason enough to slow down and pick up on this effort. And he’s articulate about it, which never hurts:

There can’t be a solution to this that starts with an adversarial role between libraries and writers. Libraries and writers are the two groups in this whole dynamic whose interests are most closely aligned. And whatever answer we find to this?—I think we need to find in partnership with our libraries.

It’s Morrison: Must Be Edinburgh Festival Time

Imagine my surprise then when – after a flight to America, some appalling jet lag and some ill-advised sleeping pills – I woke to find myself in 2043. Although I was awake in that future world for only a short time, I used my time to chart that most important of issues: the future of fiction.

Ewan Morrison

With the dependability of a swallow on final approach to Capistrano, writer Ewan Morrison lands on the pages of the Guardian with his annual provocation for the Edinburgh International Book Festival. This time, the newspaper tells us, he’ll be celebrating the anniversary of the Edinburgh World Writers’ Conference And he won’t be doing it without his own fun slap at Cory Doctorow, as a matter of fact. In the second of two lengthy installments of this year’s “Fiction in 2043″ double-essay, Morrison writes:

The joke really was on the dot.communists, whose “manifesto” had been intended somewhat ironically, and on creative-commons evangelists such as Cory Doctorow who felt they were determining the “future of the future” by giving their books away for free.

In the latter, China “saves the future of fiction” (as “the long tail falls off the end of the cliff”). To wit:

After the collapse came the new peace, according to Chinese rules. China had valued the western tradition more highly than western net-capitalists, but where and how could the canon be rebuilt? For over 20 years no “new fiction” had been generated; the last generation of “professional writers” had passed away in the 2030s. Chinese ownership of the net – with copyright protection a bedrock of the new economy, state censorship and the imprisonment of free-information activists – ensured that the west could not revert to its old ways of file sharing cannibalisation. The west was forced to write fiction again.

Maybe Morrison’s most entertaining imagining is that in 2038, “new fiction” begins to appear as fictionalized accounts of real authors’ lives from the 20th century. Hilary’s Mantle is one.

As so much real history had been lost in the digital revolution, the only way to bring these authors back to life was to invent their lives. The great rebirths from this time included Sartre, Camus, Orwell, Christie, Kafka, Joyce and EL James.

I think it’s a lighter-hearted Morrison this year, our provocateur. But there’s, as always, a barb. Underlying much of what he’s slung together and pulled apart, lies a disquieting idea of the open Web having finally verifiable truth. Morrison:

In the desire to save true history from the digital morass of mashed-up facts and to establish an empirically true history, mankind has to file through the trillion files of textual mess created by the digital revolution and by those who attempted to make money from corrupting the lives of historical figures. After all, in 2043, there are no professional critics or specialists left to judge what is real history any more – academia has had to change its face to remain profitable and serious journalism sadly, did not survive. Thus, we will never know for sure if Katie Price was a struggling author in a garret, as the sad and moving title Price of Fame depicts.

How We Talk About It, Part 1: Bezos’ Buy

I particularly liked the frankness, even freshness, of this paragraph:

No one, apparently including Mr. Bezos himself, seems to know what he intends to do with that fabled newspaper. This is, after all, a man who once said the quality he most wanted in a wife was the ability to spring him from a third-world prison. He can probably be counted on to think unpredictably.

He quotes the Times story here (this is Streitfeld and Haughney), emphasis his:

Eoin Purcell

The company has all sorts of regulatory and competitive concerns, making for a minefield of possible conflicts of interest for the owner of The Post. Amazon has opposed states’ efforts to have e-commerce companies collect sales tax. It was the main beneficiary of the Justice Department’s successful pursuit of five publishers and Apple on antitrust grounds. It is locking horns with major companies like Walmart and I.B.M. And as it expands into same-day delivery of its products, it will come up against grocery chains and drugstores.

And then Purcell writes:

In an otherwise excellent piece the NYT continues to allow this spin to go unchallenged. The main beneficiaries are consumers. Yes, per consumer the benefit is small, but when it’s all considered together, it’s enormous! It is important to acknowledge that because when you do, it reminds you that the biggest losers from Agency pricing was not Amazon, but readers! The consumer was screwed for the benefit of Apple and publishers, not Amazon, readers!

You may agree with Purcell or not, of course. Was it just about the knights on the horses? Or weren’t the townspeople in the stands involved?

Up to you. But it’s always good to bring to consciousness just how we talk about and cast these various events affecting the industry! the industry!

How We Talk About It, Part 2: DRM

We have more opportunities than ever to talk to readers, and it’s essential that we use these to promote the value we add. Defending (or attacking) DRM doesn’t add value, and nor does criticising retailers to whom many readers are loyal.

Here is the “tone question” and it’s good to have it raised, as it relates to the DRM debate, by someone who isn’t in the pro-DRM camp. Smart establishes her familiar stance:

I am one of the first to argue that the existence of DRM is damaging to the relationship between readers and authors, and more particularly between readers and publishers. I believe that DRM protects large corporates from innocent consumers and that there are better ways to enforce copyright where necessary (for many books I believe that obscurity is a greater enemy than piracy).

While some from that end of the line have at times seemed the loudest voices, nay-saying DRM at every chance, Smart is calling for another tack.

In the last few months I fear that discussions about DRM have become part of a negative cycle of debate that is even more damaging than the very existence of DRM.

Most ebook consumers are unaware of DRM thanks to the way devices are configured, and don’t care either way so long as their current device manufacturer keeps giving them ways to read which work satisfactorily…The argument that major ebook retailers are a threat is very unhelpful…Nobody cares about publishers or the publishing industry per se—readers care about finding consistently high-quality books to read, in whatever format they want them, via whatever retailer they want to visit, at a price which makes sense.

In short, Smart is saying, the message is the message, not the medium.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world and we need to compete our way to survival and start sharing success stories with the outside world every day.

Conferences

If you have a publishing conference in the offing, let me know about it via my contact page, and I’ll be happy to consider including it in my site’s listing and in columns as I have the chance. Here’s a look at conferences coming in the near term. Please note that a listing here is not my endorsement of a conference or other event, but an informational inclusion. As a service, I also list any discount codes that might be of use to readers.

September 26 New York City (Metropolitan Pavilion): Marketing + Publishing Services Conference & Expo: “This innovative conference & expo is really two related shows, held together. The Marketing Conference is a full-day dedicated event that presents a comprehensive strategy for marketing in the digital age. The Publishing Services Expo offers three finely-targeted “mini-conferences” for important and often-overlooked publishing constituencies. Each track is an affordably priced, efficiently programmed two-and-half-hour session that pairs concise educational sessions with vendor speed dating to learn about new solutions.” Produced by Digital Book World and Publishers Launch (Publishers Lunch’s Michael Cader and Mike Shatzkin). Save 25% on registration with code PORTER at checkout.

September 26 London (Southbank Centre): The Bookseller’s Children’s Conference. “Building an international children’s publishing company in an internet age…current and future technologies that are driving change in children’s market…a whistle-stop overview of the market using Nielsen BookScan sales data. Are the biggest writers continuing to dominate? Are sticker books still selling? And what’s up with YA?” More information. (Hashtag: #kidsconf13)

October 8 Frankfurt Book Fair: CONTEC Conference: “A new, highly-engaging event experience created by the Frankfurt Academy to address the complexity of the needs of today’s publishing business. CONTEC gathers stakeholders from across the publishing ecosystem – from STM and trade publishers to service providers and tech startups – in one arena to redefine and redesign the experience of publishing.” Save 20% on registration with code CONTEC13KPTW20 at checkout.

October 12 San Francisco: Writing for Change Conference: “The Fifth San Francisco Writing for Change Conference is the place to discover whether your book can change the world. The theme of the conference is “Changing the World One Book at a Time,” and the goal is to encompass business, politics, technology, social issues, the environment, culture, the law, and much more.” The event will be held at the Unitarian Universalist Center at the corner of Geary and Franklin in San Francisco.

November 21, London: The Bookseller FutureBook Conference: Once again at the Queen Elizabeth II Centre in Westminster, the conference is industry-focused and usually includes both plenary and breakout sessions during the course of the day. Details as they become available.

February 13-16, 2014: San Francisco Writers Conference: “Attendees have access to more than fifty “how to” sessions, panels, and workshops. An Independent Editor consultation and Ask a Pro are included in the registration fee. Our famously popular Speed Dating for Agents is still only $50 to pitch to a room full of agents. And you will find there are plenty of one-on-one opportunities to pitch your work to well-known publishing professionals during the weekend. The Conference features large and small traditional publishing houses, but also gives attendees the latest e-publishing, social media, and self-publishing information.”

Last Gas: McVeigh Inveighs

Good marketers should be boring the ass off their colleagues in meetings as they harp on and on about their analytics accounts. Good marketers should be sick to their back teeth fiddling with the metadata in the CMS and keeping their portion of the marketing WIP updated. Good marketers should be able to provide anyone who asks with a current marketing plan for every title on their list, complete with objectives, timelines and results so far.

Maybe he was bitten by a Buzzer from Libboo or slipped on some wet Jellybooks and took a nasty fall.

Everyone’s got a theory. Everyone’s got a method. If it’s not vertical, it’s horizontal or inevitably as we heard this week, it’s adjacent.

I’ll take the hit for that one, having just written Are You Marketing to Your “Adjacent Fans”? in Writing on the Ether at JaneFriedman.com the day before McVeigh shot himself out of the cannon. Our focus was on the marketing commentary about “non-book” comparisons and “adjacent fans” from Peter McCarthy. I fear we might have contributed to McVeigh’s caps-lock key getting stuck:

The problem is – and I think it really is a problem – THE BASICS ARE BEING MISSED.

We have to hope he doesn’t become any more agitated about all this because there’s little left but self-immolation:

Take your FaceBook ‘likes’ and stuff them where the sun don’t shine, sunshine – learn how to write a blurb.

In a quieter (not much) corner of the post, he wins my vote for including his subject’s Twitter handle (and his own, too, in the column’s footer). But isn’t that interesting? You’d think he’d toss out Twitter with the bathwater:

Of course it’s not all gloom and doom, there are a whole bunch of publishers who have it sussed and good luck to them – they’re the ones who consistently and very publicly hit the ball out of the park. For example my heart positively sang earlier in the year at The Bookseller’s marketing conference when I watched a presentation by Alice Shortland (@Alice_Shortland) from Bloomsbury talking about how they went about marketing the Polpo book. Listening to her talk us through the campaign made me want to be a Marketing Director again just so I could offer her a job and double her salary – I hope someone else in the audience did just that, she deserved it.

Not that the Twitterati get off entirely free:

I don’t give a monkeys how many retweets you got last month – show me a marketing plan and a comprehensively completed author questionnaire for EVERY title on your list.

The “whole bunch of publishers who have it sussed” aren’t going to do it for our friend, no.

A lot of what I see is people moving counters around the board trying to look busy and on-trend while the books they’re unrelentedly pushing out into the world are either selling or not selling pretty much left to their own devices. So much wasted time, so much wasted energy, so much wasted money.

If God had meant us to read lots of books, He would have invented a device to store a limitless library of books in the palm of your hand.

What I get from McVeigh’s jeremiad is that the still-developing elements of marketing publicity, particularly those in the social-networking sphere, are confusing people into thinking that there is algorithmic alchemy in the land, marketing magic that can levitate a book above the mundanities of customary approaches.

Don’t get me wrong, I love talking high concept as much as the next guru but frankly the old penny pinching marketing director inside me is finding the whole pantomime increasingly difficult to stomach.

And so no more Mr. Nice Chris. What do you think? Does he have a point?

From now on it’s strictly nuts and bolts from me. No more fancy concept stuff till we’ve got back to basics and sorted out all the boring sloggy stuff. I know it’s a wild idea but how about we put the wheels back on our marketing machines before we get all fancy-pants and conceptual with our shit? I will if you will. Who’s in?

2 Comments

In that previous Guardian piece you linked to above, Ewan Morrison made the risible claim that “self e-publishing” was a bubble which would collapse within 18 months. He wrote that article in January 2012.

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Publishing Perspectives is an online magazine of international book publishing news and opinion. Our global network of publishing experts and reporters provide on-the-ground info and analysis from those on the cutting edge of digital, global, and self-publishing.